may have been a simple "we see you have patented xyz, would you consider our doing abc a violation, and if so, what's licensing going to cost?"

answer may have been along the lines of "pretty much anything you do we may try to sue you for, so you'd be better off paying us a ton of money upfront now". "OK, no thanks, we'll take our chances in court."

Or it may have been something completely different. But that's just my guess.

Does a headline that ends in a question mark set off your red flags?
Can I convince you to buy this bridge I'm selling by hinting at it using a question?
What if I cobble together a tiny tidbit of info from groklaw with a really inflammatory headline, will slashdot publish it?

Does a headline that ends in a question mark set off your red flags?Can I convince you to buy this bridge I'm selling by hinting at it using a question?What if I cobble together a tiny tidbit of info from groklaw with a really inflammatory headline, will slashdot publish it?

There is no "danger" for google in any form, nor did the judge imply it was plausible that google did anything.

Uh...

"In reading the Daubert briefing, it appears possible that early on Google recognized that it would infringe patents protecting at least part of Java, entered into negotiations with Sun [Microsystems] to obtain a license for use in Android, then abandoned the negotiations as too expensive, and pushed home with Android without any license at all," Alsup wrote in the letter filed in US District

I think the point is that if you google for the words in the letter, they don't show up anywhere except the article. I don't really understand this stuff but since other articles filed by the court are available on the web, wouldn't this letter also be there? Maybe I should use a different search engine (ha ha!). Groklaw also hasn't reported this letter either.

Furthermore, doing more searches I can't find anyone else reporting this letter except TFA (although a *lot* of sites have reprinted it or linked

Recent patent law rulings have made staying supposedly, deliberately ignorant of what the competition does in the same field less and less of a defense. Depending on just what the questions were, we may well be seeing the capstone case where several district courts have, between them, created an interpretation where the defending side is always "damned if they do, damned if they don't" regardless of the equities of the situation. If the questions were anything like you suggested, expect this one to be the c

I heard mr java himself give a talk (I think it was at the java 10th anniv party at the santa clara campus, a few yrs back) and he seemed to say that mobile java (something about south america, too, I didn't quite get that) was a HUGE thing for sun. almost the reason for java to exist (the way he talked about java on mobile phones).

I once heard 'Mr. Java' talk about how Oak was going to run on television remote controls and make them better. It may be that one of the reasons for Android's success is that Google was finally able to build a very good Java runtime for mobile. Or perhaps the hardware just finally got powerful enough, but it's a far cry from the microcontroller or 'java processor' design concept.

"Software embedded in or bundled with industrial control systems, wireless mobile telephones, wireless handheld devices, kiosks, TV/STB, Blu-ray Disc devices, telematics and network control switching equipment, printers and storage management systems, and other related systems are excluded from this definition and not licensed under this Agreement."

As for the open source release, that's covered under the Java Language Spec patent grant.

Who cares?
How does Google's leveraging off Java deprive Sun revenue from its R&D? You know, like what patents are intended for?
Fucking lawyers. Unable to create any real value themselves, they resort to contriving some for themselves by destroying it for many others. Utterly, utterly ignoble profession.

If I'm an inventor why should I have to build a factory? Not everyone wants to be an end-to-end mega-corporation. Maybe even a mega-corporation invests a lot of time and money into something and discovers it's not a product they want to sell but is still valuable and could be offered by someone else?

I have an application that I wrote that we aren't using at the company any more. That doesn't mean I can just take that application and start selling it. My employer spent a lot of money on development.

and presumably your former employer broke even on the software they have no use for anymore? they'd have budgeted for that, right? if so, then any patents are a potential extra revenue stream, but certainly not the incentive to invent the software.

it would be similar to charging your local council for the privilege of collecting your garbage, because you have rights over that garbage.

because more likely than not, some of your code violates someones patents, and they could sue your company.

its true; and as time goes on, it gets truer, still.

I've heard this said (forgot who said it, but he was a smart man) that a real reason why companies don't opensource things like drivers is because it only makes it easier for other trolls to look at their code and find, via coincidence or not, come patent violation.

so companies are *motivated* to not release source since it does give them protection.

Though you do have a point here in that many patents today (esp. software ones) are overly broad. With plastics, what's patented is the particular compound, not the general idea of polymerization. In case of Oracle, they patented some very generic VM implementation techniques. That they shouldn't be able to do so is a reasonable argument to make.

Does this mean every peice of Java software written should owe Oracle money?

No, since the language itself isn't patented. Most high-performance Java VMs, however, likely violate some of their patents.

Both of you seem to assume garethw is attacking the IP holders when, to me, it seems like he's attacking the lawyers that twist, bend, and distort law until it makes them fat loads of cash, helping few others in return. ie. The Lawyers buy boats, everyone else loses.

I don't necessarily believe IP/patents/etc should last as long as they do; 5 years tops and after that, public domain. however, the system has been so abused and corrupted that it's more harm than good at this point.

Who cares? How does Microsoft's leveraging off Java deprive Sun revenue from its R&D? FTFY.

Lets call a spade a spade folks, you can't say it is bad for one company because you don't like them but wonderful for a different company to pull the same shit because they make you squee like a fangirl.

You see it is THIS, this right here that pisses me off. first the guy insulted me by calling me a fanboy when I have written quite long lists of what is sucking at MSFT (Ballmer is a shitty CEO with a case of "me too!" Apple envy, mobile strategy being flinging shit at a wall and hoping something sticks, burning playsforsure which was quite popular for subscriptions to push a broken zunepass,killing the $50 Win 7 HP upgrade thus encouraging piracy, etc) and then in the very next sentence as you pointed out

Google probably thought that the patents were not valid, but thought that if it were least expensive to license them, they would do it that way. When it wasn't the least expensive way to do it, they chose to proceed and litigate.

This is damaging in the fact that Google knew that there were patent issues since they tried to seek licensing for them. If they then later claim that there are no patent issues, it shoots a big hole in their defense.

Except for the fact that software patents are so vague that it is impossible to tell what violates patents and what doesn't. Until we finally decide to abolish patents, no one can ever know for sure if something will be in violation of a patent or not.

Most likely Google asked Sun how much money it would cost to license the patent for X because Google had no possible way of knowing if something would violate that patent or not, obviously the price of "protection money" on something that may or may not be

Probably due to the fact that they are being sued for infringement? Just a guess mind you....

A court can look at facts like these to determine intent, and if it does turn out that Google attempted to get licensing on the very items they are being sued on, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that this will damage their case.

The court could look at intent if it mattered to the case, but it can't just spin stories of guilt, it would have to have some factual evidence that the innocent interpretation isn't the true case. There isn't any that we know of.

Nope. Dalvik's aim is to provide a more modern intermediate representation. Java bytecode is not that different to Smalltalk-80 VM bytecode, which, in turn, inherits a lot from P-Code. P-Code was created in 1966 and was the state of the art in compiler technology back then. It let you ship Pascal code in an intermediate form that could be trivially compiled for the target architecture.

Like P-Code and Smalltalk-80 bytecode, Java bytecode is stack-based. This makes it very difficult to do various kind

I sincerely hope the Judge is smart enough to spot a failure of jurisprudence on behalf of the Patenting Authority. If these patents had been judged correctly the first time, this mess would never of had to been bothered with.
I also can’t blame Google for disregarding unrealistic claims of property regarding common-sense programming advancements. The claims are likely rationally un-defendable, like nearly all software patents these days.

Call me a dreamer, but instead of Did Google Knowingly Violate Java Patents? question, wouldn't it sound better better the Did Google know that SUN's patents were invalid and thus there was nothing to violate or pay for? or even Did Google know software patents are invalid?

Before using the "correlation/causation" meme, thanks for assuming I'm a good guy that never saw a murdered prostitute. While true in my case, it isn't necessarily to be so for all the readers of/. that never saw one of the two but actually saw the other - in such cases, your "coincidence question" will not even reach the "correlation/causation" stage.

I'm not sure however what you intend to suggest. I'm afraid of a suggestion on the line that "being a dreamer, one wishes that Larry Ellison would actually

I'm Jim James. Next on Talk Town, we will have people on from both sides of the issue to discuss it. get your calls in! and now we pause for this break.

And we're back at Talk Town. the topic today is decora: unimaginative hack? we have EJ Jones from the Washington Center for Economic Progress, and Stavai Smith from the Institute for Freedom and Governance. Thank you both for being here.

- Thank you-- Thank you

EJ why dont you go first. Is decora a worthless, mindless hack, filling up the internet with repetit

" in order for an invention to be patentable, it must not only be novel, but it must also be a nonobvious improvement over the prior art" - http://www.bitlaw.com/patent/requirements.html#nonobvious [bitlaw.com]
No joke, the "Upgrade" button is a patent the United States Patent and Trademark Office is currently holding as a protected I.P.. They've clearly failed to perform their due diligence regarding what are technical innovations versus only Trade Secrets.
I believe the root of this problem is due to the exponentia

Correct, the fact that Google offered to license the patents does not,in and of itself, indicate that Google thought the patents were valid. All it means is that Google was aware that they existed. It is distinctly possible that they thought it might be cheaper to license the patents from Sun than to challenge their validity in court. When Sun wanted more than that, Google decided to go ahead and let Sun/Oracle take them to court.

I think they just tried to work around the only profitable aspect of Java. I'm sure if they thought they would be liable and have to pay for it, they would have just used something else. Not to mention that using Java was more like doing Sun a favor than anything else, despite the implementation. It kept Java relevant while Sun was dying. Google also helped popularize OpenOffice.

I think Sun should have filed the suit before being bought by Oracle. I've heard arguments that they couldn't afford to or whateve

Isn't the more logical interpretation that google saw that java already had a history in the mobile space, and rather than re-invent the wheel decided it would be cheaper and simpler to use a java VM, and went to sun to licence the patents needed to do that. That failed, so they said 'alrighty then' and wrote the clean-room dalvik VM which differs from java in a lot of key design decisions. Isn't that how the patent system is supposed to work?

Overall, Alsup seems to be increasing the pressure on both Oracle and Google to settle, according to Florian Mueller, a blogger who closely tracks open-source software legal matters.

"Yesterday's order concerning the possibility of a staywas bad news for Oracle," Mueller said via e-mail. "Today's notice looks like a clear signal to Google that they should recognize their obligation to pay. But the problem is that Oracle's demands are apparently way above anything that Google could pay without changing its Android business model from 'free-of-charge' to 'fee-based.' I don't know whether Oracle will reduce its demands substantially in order to enable a near-term settlement."

There's an irritating trend in Slashdot discussions to cite bogeymen to dismiss any news that may be negative toward some protagonist of the community, such as Google. "Oh, there's a statement from Florian Mueller, so the entire article is FUD even though the judge really did ask those questions in his letter. I'm not listening, la-la-la."

When someone is as consistently wrong as Florian, or *World.com, then it's less effort to just ignore everything they say, rather than check everything and find the small percentage of times when they happen to be coincidentally right. Magic 8 Ball is more accurate than these sources.

"In reading the Daubert briefing, it appears possible that early on Google recognized that it would infringe patents protecting at least part of Java, entered into negotiations with Sun [Microsystems] to obtain a license for use in Android, then abandoned the negotiations as too expensive, and pushed home with Android without any license at all," Alsup wrote in the letter filed in US District Court for the Northern District of California.

Maybe this has been tried... But if Oracle or Google or Microsoft... Someone with these lawyers on retainer... Will please patent or reverse patent or trademark "first post" and kindly sue Anonymous, we slashdoters will be eternally grateful and go red sox.

A rational reason to inquire about patents you don't think you actually violate is to avoid being shaken down by a patent troll about them. As the tangled web of patent lawsuits in the industry indicates, the likelihood of an illegitimate shakedown is worth a great deal of vigilance. How many companies pay out hundreds of millions a year in licensing of illegitimate patents because they figure it's cheaper than litigating and losing a lawsuit lottery?

Nobody sells a high tech product without knowing that it infringes on some patent you don't own or have license to!!!

EVERY SINGLE COMPANY that ships a smart phone today, KNOWS that they are infringing on a patent held by someone else!

There are over 50 companies that hold at least 300 patents each covering smart phone technology. Who knows how many companies hold patents over various manufacturing technologies used. There are thousands of patents out there on many very basic software techniques. IBM, Motorola, HP, Intel, Apple, HTC, Samsung, Google, Microsoft, all hold thousands of patents that more or less apply to Smart phones and computers. And there are tons more. These are the guys that produce products. Many, many patents are held by trolls that produce nothing but lawsuits.

How then can any company hope to build a product that is free and clear of patents?

If knowing you might have patent issues means something significant, then ban all high tech products! Including frankly most medicines. Including every modern car. Including every T.V. Including ever significant piece of software!

In light of this rather obvious fact, what is the point this Judge is trying to make? How is any product any different?

I wouldn't assume that. There's definitely a patent thicket related to cell phone technology, but for the most part all of the companies involved have cross licensed all their patents with each other. You see battles like this come up when you get a company (Oracle) that isn't a cellphone company and thus not part of the cross-licensing that wants a piece of the action, or you see it when companies (like Apple vs Samsung) decide they can't effectively compete and try to find areas in their portfolio that ar

Google very likely knew about the patents, but in this game the particular patents are of little issue. Most likely, they just wanted a broad license to any patents Sun had, and didn't do any study of particular patents. I am not sure why they would, as that would just increase their liability, and would not have helped them anyway.

Google has tried to negotiate the right to use the patents. As it has failed, Google has done all the technical possible efforts (dalvick,...) in order to avoid patent violation and still have a fast and usable language.I think that Google has been very creative to keep the language syntax and the libraries almost identical (they are both patent free) and to not copy any other aspects of Java.If a real patent (not trivial,...) has still been violated, either it is a small violation that could be fixed by

If this judge were honest, they'd see that until they invalidated the patents, Google was forced to negotiate to license them first. Google is just trying to do some "progress in science and the useful arts" despite those patents. But patent holders like Sun have no obligation to allow their government-issued monopoly to be used for progress. In fact they practically always obstruct progress by others until their price is paid.

Just because you offer to give some gangster your wallet when they have their gun

It seems to me that the court shouldn't use some negotiation against them. We live in a day and age where it's often cheaper to pay off an invalid patent claim than to try to fight it, so every company has to figure out what it's going to cost them to make a deal up front.

It seems to me, that's not an admission by the defendant that they thought the patent would be infringed, or was valid - simply that they were trying to decide if it was worth fighting or not.

As sound as legal analysis from an anonymous poster on pro-Google Slashdot must be, I'm afraid you're not as persuasive as you think you are. What's happening is that the judge is pressuring both parties to reach a settlement, which is probably what's going to happen.

The reason this is relevant is that it showed that they may have knowingly violated the patents. If the patent is found to be valid and they are found to be infringing it is far worse for Google if it can be shown that they did it knowingly instead of simply by accident.